April 27th, 2018 – Investigating the origins of life

with Jonathan Liu

Investigating the Origins of Life

As far as we know, Earth is the only planet that can harbor life. But even on Earth, the question of how life arose in the first place is extremely hard to answer. Trying to uncover the evolutionary history of the origins of life is a complicated problem, involving a mixture of geology, biology, chemistry, physics, and plain old deductive guesswork. In this talk, Jonathan will outline prevailing theories for how life originated on Earth and highlight areas where scientists have made clever progress by applying principles from physics. By the end, Jonathan hopes to impart the concept that the origin of life on Earth was an extremely complicated process that nevertheless was made possible by the early Earth’s landscape.

Evolutionary history of life on Earth

Jonathan Liu

Jonathan is a Bay Area native who is currently a PhD student in Physics at UC Berkeley. In his current research, he applies principles of physics to study gene regulation in developing organisms. Outside of science, he likes to sing, play the piano, and swing dance.